The invention is related to a method for selecting a phone number in an electronic communication device, an electronic communication device and a charging unit for charging the electronic communication device. The solution according to the invention can be exploited, for example, in portable mobile phones and in their charging devices. In this instance, a phone number is construed to mean in the widest sense all number and character strings which are used in electric data transfer for the identification of the recipient of data
It is known that electronic communication devices, particularly mobile phones, are controlled by means of a keypad. Since it is already possible to make the electronical and radio frequency elements of the device very small in size, the number and size of the keys are the factors which largely determine the size of the communication device. For example, the keypad of the mobile phone cannot be infinitely reduced since ultimately the operational convenience will suffer. In the context of this application, a mobile phone is used as an example of a communication device which is equipped with many keys in its conventional implementations and which is equipped with a display.
There are known solutions in which one has tried to find a new kind of way for controlling an electronic communication device. For example, in the patent application WO 93/14589, a phone designed in the form of a pen has been presented, the aim of which has been a completely keyfree phone. According to this solution, the user feeds the necessary data into the phone by using a pressable and rotatable adjuster by which the numbers or letters are selected. The phone shows only a single selected letter or digit on its display at a time. As indicated by the FIGS. 2 and 5 of the WO patent application, the amount of characters which can be displayed by the device is very limited. A better exploitation of the display is not either the aim of said patent application but the display is even smaller than in electronic communication devices according to the prior art in general.
It has been observed that present-day users of a mobile phone make a major proportion of their calls without using the numerical keys for selecting the phone number. An accustomed user has generally programmed the phone numbers he/she most often needs into the memory of the device, and then he/she selects the desired number by means of the menu keys and the display of the phone. It seems probable that this trend will continue as the displays become improved and the amount of memory places increases. Thus the use of numerical keys will be reduced significantly.
In the study which lead to the present invention, one has aimed at finding a new method for the input of data without using the conventional, space requiring integrated keypad built into the mobile phone. The aim of the present invention is to provide an electronic communication device, such as a mobile phone, which has its amount of keys considerably reduced compared to the communication devices which are in current use. Furthermore, another aim of this invention is to find a new method for a better exploitation of the display of the mobile phone. A further aim of the present invention is to make the recording of numbers and names into the memory of the communication device easier and more convenient than present. The aim of the invention is not to totally eliminate the keys but to present a sensible compromise with respect to the number of keys and their ease of use.
Another aim of the present invention is to provide such an electronic communication device and correspondingly such a charging unit for charging the electronic communication device such that by means of them, the above presented problems can be solved and the disadvantages resolved. To achieve this, it is characteristic of the method for forming a character string in a communication device equipped with a display and a keypad according to the invention that said character string is formed in said communication device by selecting the desired characters one at a time in which case for selecting a certain character belonging to said character string
several characters are shown simultaneously on said display and a selecting cursor pointing to at least one character, PA1 as a response to a certain first key command, said selecting cursor is moved to point to a corresponding character, and PA1 as a response to a certain second key command, the character indicated by the selecting cursor is considered as having become selected.
The invention additionally relates to an electronic communication device and, according to the invention, it is characteristic of this device that its keypad consists of scanning keys for scanning of data on the display of the device, display control keys for influencing the representation of data on said display and call control keys for the start and finish of phone connections. By phone connections, this is naturally construed to mean all known speech, telefax and data transfer connections.